Crop Signs

The water rose to my chin, and splashes got into my mouth. I was quivering in the frozen water. The sound was deafening. “Let’s get out of here,” I gurgled… Swimming against the sub-zero current that was trying to bring me back into the bus was complicated.

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This is an excerpt from my first novel, The Captives. I wrote it in Junior High. The storyline is so convoluted that it’s hard to give a synopsis, but here goes:

On his birthday, a Christian teen named David is on his way to school when his bus crashes into a river. All his friends drown, but David escapes only to be taken CAPTIVE by a ruthless gang which is touring the country kidnapping Christian teens and martyring them. He falls in love with a fellow Christian prisoner, Megan, and together they lead a revolt against the terrorist gang.

Obviously, The Captives is a literary masterpiece. I can’t resist offering a few more of my favorite quotes:

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What I saw made a shower of fear grip me and shred me to pieces.

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I didn’t want to stand there anymore—and I had gained a little bit of strength—so I walked towards the road slowly, mourning the loss of my friends… Some birthday this was turning out to be!

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“Were there any survivors?” My mom asked it, hoping for a glimmer of hope.

“No.” Mom’s tears flowed like the unstoppable river that had drowned so many people earlier that day.

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The whole hallway echoed with cheers after Joe left. “Man, you were good!” “Yeah, you told him!” “I can’t believe you said that about his breathe!” “Too bad you have to die on a cross.” “I hope that you escape again and rescue us all!”

I yelled over the roar, “Thank you! But it wasn’t just me. It was God who gave me the courage.”

The applause thickened. “You’re too modest, Mike!” “I hope that your God saves you!”

                “I hope so too!”

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I stopped working on The Captives around page 100. I can’t remember why, but I think it had something to do with how excited I was for my new project, The Warrior’s Heart. Here’s a brief synopsis:

A Christian teen named David is on his way to Argentina for a missions trip when his plane crashes, and he alone escapes by parachute to a mysterious island, only to be taken hostage by a ruthless band of natives. He falls in love with a girl named Megan, and together they hike through the mountains, escape an avalanche and keep warm in a frozen canyon by hugging through the night. Then they kill a dragon and save everyone.

I wrote The Warrior’s Heart for several years in high school, rushing to the theaters every December among a host of other teenage novelists who found inspiration in The Lord of the Rings.

However, I never completed The Warrior’s Heart. I stopped around page 100. I’m not exactly sure what happened. I remember reading through the chapters I had written and noticing their enormous shortcomings. I remember despairing of ever being a real author, and consoling myself by starting a new novel: The Five Fates.

I worked on The Five Fates for a couple years, wrote about 100 pages, and stopped.

Exactly a year ago, I started The Red Road. This week, I passed page 100. I can feel the chapters dragging behind me, slowing my momentum. The past few weeks of writing have been hard. Reading backwards, I am not proud of everything I’ve written. Looking forward, I’m not confident I can write anything better. Maybe it would be best just to start from scratch with a new story, a better story.

In some ways, writing has only gotten harder as I’ve grown older. I’m not the Junior High student writing about dragons anymore. Each year that passes adds greater stakes to dreams like these.

I’ve talked to military kids who grew up moving every two years. When they finally decide to stay in one place for good, a restlessness assaults them at the two-year mark. They experience an impulse for flight as strong as that of migratory birds, an impulse which seems wrong to resist. For them, breaking the two-year cycle requires a feat of perseverance, a breaking of wrong instinct.

I think this is common to all of us. Who knows what wrong instincts we are all harboring in our bellies, unbeknownst to others and perhaps even to ourselves? Only you can know what secret, often nonsensical, urges you must work against.

For my part, I must break the 100-page barrier (among many other, more sinister, impulses in my life). Communicating how I feel is half the battle. As any verbal processor knows, there’s great significance in winding your way toward the perfect words. Some conversations I’ll spend hours processing through the same vague impressions, turning over the same words again and again until I’ve come by that perfect, distilled image or phrase. When I find it, I may repeat the phrase for days or even weeks, trying to remember which friends I’ve shared it with so the revelation doesn’t seem rehearsed when I process it for the tenth time.

Finding a good phrase is like discovering a diagnosis for your sickness. These muscle pains, fevers, and wheezing cough aren’t just random symptoms anymore: they have a proper name.

There are many truisms we writers use to encourage ourselves. One of the most famous (and one that’s helped me from time to time) goes roughly like this:

Writing is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way.

I recently stumbled across a new metaphor that makes sense of how I feel today as I sit down to write:

Writing is like making crop circles without a ladder.

I start the day where I left off, tracing the previous day’s curve until I arrive at a dead end of corn. Then I start clipping away, projecting from the previous day’s trajectory to guess today’s. Some days I take a machete with me and cut stalks in wide swaths. Other days I bend them with tiny scissors, troubling over each stalk.

In the beginning I had a clear picture in my mind of what I wanted this crop sign to look like. But it’s been a year, and the picture is getting blurry. I don’t have a helicopter or plane, and even when I drag my stepping stool into the middle of the field, it doesn’t afford much perspective. The stalks rise over my head. I try to measure out the distance between lines and circles, but there’s no way of knowing whether it’ll look right from the sky. I’m lost in my own corn maze with a pair of scissors.

So there’s my picture, my phrase. It doesn’t solve my problems, because novels can’t be solved, only made. But at least I have a few words for why this is so hard. Like David from The Captives and The Warrior's Heart, I am committed to surviving, slaying my dragons, and—most importantly—romancing a girl named Megan.*

*The name Megan, like the dragons I'm slaying, is metaphorical. Just in case you were wondering.